Sunday, August 23, 2015

Denmark and the Jews

On a recent trip to Denmark, I visited the Jewish Museum,
located in the former Royal Boat House in Copenhagen. It is small but
architecturally significant, designed by Daniel Liebeskind, and presents a
picture of Jewish Life in Denmark, including during World War II. In 1940, the
German Nazi army invaded Denmark, and King Christian X signed a peace treaty,
which left great autonomy for the Danish government, and included protection
for Danish Jews from deportation to concentration camps. In August 1943, with
concern about resistance in Denmark, the Nazis pushed the Danish government,
which resigned; the Nazis then decided to move forward with solving the “Jewish
Question”. Their plans leaked by a German official to the Danish parliament,
thousands of Danes worked on transporting almost all of Denmark’s nearly 8,000
Jews across the Oresund to Sweden, a neutral country which accepted them. There
is a popular story that, when the Danish Jews were told to put on yellow
stars, King Christian appeared in public with one himself. According the
US Holocaust Museum, that story is fictional, and in fact Jews in Denmark
were never forced to wear yellow stars. However, they also note that

“In the end, the Germans arrested
and deported 476 Jews to Theresienstadt, a ghetto and concentration camp in
German-occupied Bohemia (now a part of the Czech Republic), where 52 of them
died. Even then, the Danish people sent parcels of food and provisions to their
Jewish countrymen. The intense public focus generated by constant demands from
the Danish Red Cross to visit the Danish Jews in Theresienstadt may well have
prevented the Germans from deporting them to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing
center.”

99% of Denmark’s Jews thus survived, unmatched anywhere else
in Europe. In the US Holocaust Museum, there are panels and panels of lists of
people known to have saved the life of at least one Jew during the Holocaust.
There are several panels of people from Italy, and from France, and many, many
from the Netherlands many of whose people were heroic in the effort (including
the ultimately unsuccessful effort to hide Anne Frank and her family). But as I
kept looking for Denmark when I visited there, looking for a long list, I kept
missing it. Then I found it. Very short. One entry only: “The Danish People”.

This still brings tears to my eyes; I can barely say it
without sobbing, but here in Denmark it is more real. And I ask the question:
Why? Why here? Well, there are many reasons. Sweden was one; it was a short
distance away across a strait so narrow that it is now crossed by a bridge, and
was willing to accept the Jews. Indeed, in answering my question, a Danish
friend says “well, it was Sweden”. Undoubtedly, this is a big part of the
truth. But it was not the Swedes who took thousands of Jews across the Oresund
in fishing boats in the dead of night (the fishing boat has become a symbol of
this effort; several Holocaust museums have acquired them, in Jersusalem and in
Houston , and this one pictured in DC), it was Danes.
Why them, so much more than the French, or Italians, or Poles, or
Belgians or even the Dutch? Danish people say that it is just the way that
Danes are; that the Jews were seen as Danes, as their countrymen, and that
there is great social cohesion here; they point to the current social welfare
state, the high taxes that ensure that the basic social needs of all Danish
people are met, as evidenced of the national character. Undoubtedly, this too
is part of the truth. In addition, there were not so many Jews in Denmark, so
the Germans were less fixated on them, and it also seems to be the case that
the fact that the Danes (and Swedes) were Nordic, blond, blue-eyed Aryans that Hitler admired made him deal less harshly with these countries.

There were Danish Nazis; we have seen their armbands in the
city museum of Odense. But, still, it is a remarkable thing. And I don’t really
know why; why the Nazi sympathizers were never as able to gain clout in Denmark
as in other countries, including England and the US. There was no Quisling
government as in Norway. I don’t know how it would have been if there had been
10 or 100 times more Jews, if they had been more recent immigrants from Eastern
Europe. I don’t know what the French would have done if there had been a Sweden
available. But I have a hard time believing that the people of any other
country would have matched what was done by the Danes.